Quiet Professionals, Noisy Machinery

Assclown of the Ides: Little Dick Blumenthal (3-time winner)

This is a mostly-repop’d Assclown of the Ides. We’ll explain why at the end. Slick Dick Blumenthal is a Senator from Connecticut; he’s also a serial fantasist who built his career on claims of Vietnam heroism which were entirely fabricated.

The news has been full of the camera-happy face of Slick Dick Blumenthal, the junior senator from Connecticut. For over 20 years, from 1980 to 2010, Blumenthal falsely claimed to be a Vietnam veteran, and as his ego swelled up larger and larger, a Vietnam hero. Exposed during a Senate campaign, Blumenthal was protected by a friendly media and went on to win over a non-veteran who didn’t make phony veteran claims.

Since his election he has renewed phony veteran claims, although he is careful not to do them where any citizen reporters or rolling cell-phone cameras are present.

The New York Times, which supports Blumenthal and considers his phony veteran status no big deal (no one in a decision-making post there ever served in the military), nonetheless reported on his false claims in 2010.

Former Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut found it puzzling: over time, his friend Attorney General Richard Blumenthal kept revising how he talked about his military service during the Vietnam War. At first, in the 1980s, he was humble. He played it down, Mr. Shays recalled, characterizing it as humdrum desk work.

Over the last few years, however, more sweeping claims crept into Mr. Blumenthal’s descriptions, he said: that Mr. Blumenthal had served in Vietnam and had felt the sting of an ungrateful nation as he returned.

“He just kept adding to the story, the more he told it,” Mr. Shays said.

Mr. Shays said he became alarmed enough by the discrepancies that he at times considered mentioning the issue to Mr. Blumenthal, who on Tuesday said he took “full responsibility” for the occasions when he “misspoke” about his military history.

Shays, who reported Blumenthal’s ever-growing hero story, himself was no hero: he is a coward who dodged the Vietnam draft, like most of his generation in Congress. But he never denied that, unlike his friend Slick Dick.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Shays attended a ceremony with Mr. Blumenthal in Bridgeport, to honor workers killed during an accident. When it was his turn to speak, Mr. Blumenthal at one point brought up the subject of his military service and lamented that when “we returned from Vietnam” Americans had spit on soldiers, Mr. Shays recalled.

“He is the kind of person I cared enough about that I wish I had nipped this in the bud when it was fomenting,” Mr. Shays said.

Fortunately for Shays, and Blumenthal, the voters of Connecticut don’t care if their war heroes are real, or fake. Like Slick Dick.

Like Shays, Blumenthal’s reason for not going was pure, base cowardice. The initial Times report on his deception noted, after quoting Blumenthal saying in plain words, “I served in Vietnam,” that the facts were rather different:

There was one problem: Mr. Blumenthal, a Democrat now running for the United States Senate, never served in Vietnam. He obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970 and took repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war, according to records.

The Times report quoted several of Blumenthal’s lies about his Vietnam service, and even included video of the yellow-bellied phony stealing actual vets’ Vietnam valor.

Blumenthal’s response to the Times report was to call it “outrageous distortion.” But every word was factual and backed up by Blumenthal’s own records, that showed him dodging the draft until there was no danger of ground combat, and then performing minimal reserve service (six month’s active duty for training) stateside.

Contemporary Comment 15 Feb 17:

As it happened, we learned more about Blumenthal’s impersonation of a combat Marine, and the next year we had a second report. That second report showed both his presence in a “special” USMCR unit for Washington-establishment draft evaders, and his career opposition to gun rights. Because this post is very long, we’ll put the second report after the jump.

Meanwhile, Blumenthal is back in the news.

Blumenthal in 2017 is the Voice of Integrity (so he says)

The Daily Caller notes that Blumenthal, a man who couldn’t spell “Integrity” with Noah Webster on the Ouija Board, has become a DC spokesman for the same:

“It is important that every aspect of [Judge Gorsuch’s] background be critically and closely scrutinized,” Blumenthal told the Wall Street Journal.

“This issue goes to credibility and qualifications,” Blumenthal said.

Blumenthal’s own credibility has been called into question since he entered public life. When Blumenthal first ran for the Senate in 2010, the New York Times revealed that he had lied for years about fighting in the Vietnam War. Blumenthal repeatedly touted his supposed combat experience in speeches to veterans groups and civic organizations, saying he had “served in Vietnam.”

Little Dick has also been criticized for going public with a slanted version of an off-the-record meeting, but for a guy who sent someone else to fight in his place, and then lied about it for over a decade, that’s a pretty minor breach of integrity.

Blumenthal’s Vietnam phony episode is well known both to his friends in the press, who pretend it never happened, and his political opponents:

Sen.Richard Blumenthal, who never fought in Vietnam when he said for years he had (major lie),now misrepresents what Judge Gorsuch told him?

Blumenthal is a politician, so he’s an assclown by default. We could find good reasons, we expect, to put 435 Congressmen and 100 Senators in this position of dishonor. So we usually don’t. But he’s such an excellent and extreme assclown that he deserves it: for his moral and physical cowardice in the Vietnam War, for his life as a poseur since, and for his malignant, militant hoplophobia.

Moral and Physical Cowardice

Like many other moral and physical cowards, Dick is concerned lest something injure his quivering pink body, and shrinks from physical risk. While this is unbecoming in a man, it is the core and essence of his character. And it explains why he made the decisions he did as a young adult.

In his youth, the essential fact of life for men coming of age was the draft and the Vietnam War. In Dick’s upper-middle-class burb, there was little real risk of being drafted to Vietnam as a grunt, and for a weak but intelligent and glib Jewish kid the odds were almost zero — drafted, he’d have been sent to some technical school and done his two years holding a screwdriver or soldering iron, not an M16A1. But even in his teens Dick was contemptuous of the “losers” who went to combat, and felt service beneath him, so he did everything he could to stay out of the service entirely, and was almost successful.

What ended his string of deferments was another assclown, Richard Nixon (making this, at least this part of it, a tale of two Dicks. Call ’em Big, or Tricky, Dick and Little Dick). Nixon made a campaign promise to do something about the unfair draft system, which shuffled poor city and farm kids off to the infantry and gave well-to-do suburban kids numerous escape hatches. So Tricky Dick instituted a lottery for the draft: now, your likelihood of being called to the colors depended not upon how well you could manipulate legalities or how well Daddy could schmooze your local selective service board, but upon the happenstance of your date of birth, times the happenstance of the order of dates drawn from a big wire basket for your year group. Riding a deferment, as Little Dick had done for five or six years, was no longer an option.

(This is why, by the way, Vietnam war protests exploded on colleges after Nixon’s inauguration, even though many more were killed on Johnson’s watch: Ivy League rich boys like Little Dick had been content to let the working classes do their dying for them).

Little Dick was born on February 13th, 1946 (not a Friday — we checked) and was therefore exposed to the 1969 Draft lottery. His number was a seemingly high 152 — but all numbers through 195 were called. Dick talks a lot about “public service” now, but he was never interested in military service, selfless service. This is a guy who’s never done a selfless act in nearly 67 years of relentless self-promotion, and he sure wasn’t going to do anything that might harm his timid little self.

Instead, he joined a Washington-based US Marine Corps Reserve unit that existed, principally, to provide draft deferments for the sons of the connected. The reserves then were not like the reserves now. They were not called up for Vietnam; they became a haven for ambitious men who wanted to rule the chumps who were off taking risks.

Blumenthal went to initial entry training, including boot camp, which was his only exposure to the actual Marine Corps. Then he attended occasional weekend drills. Later, he transferred to a Connecticut unit to finish out his service contract. But he never went overseas, not even for a day, and every time he’s said he did, he’s been stealing the valor of actual veterans.

Life as a Poseur

Like most other physical and moral cowards, Dick couldn’t face the fact that the best of his generation did what he so assiduously avoided.

For the free-love generation, the military was an evil thing, and Dick’s compromise, in taking a zero-risk and not-too-military reserve gig that erased his draft risk, was cowardly but accepted. But a funny thing happened after the war, as the dodgers like Little Dick climbed in the ranks of the national political and academic elite. Some of them began to feel shame for their actions (not Little Dick, of course). Others reassessed the war. It was now not fought by monsters against the noble NLF, as Dick chanted during his protesting era. It was obvious to all that the resulting Communist regimes in Southeast Asia were exactly what Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon deployed American force to prevent. Far from being a foolish “red scare,” the most grim prognostications of the most embittered anti-communist fell far short of imagining the real nightmares of re-education camps, midnight escapes by leaky sampan, or Cambodia’s systematic murder of the educated.

In the 1970s, it began to dawn on America that our soldiers in Vietnam had been good men, and some even came to understand that they had served in a good cause; that their leaders, not they, were the guilty parties. Even Hollywood began to approach the Vietnam vet, first as a mentally damaged, stressed man who could not relate to his surroundings, or a victim crucified by his country… but in time, they gave the public the Vietnam vet as hero, whether in Vietnam or not (how many of the 70s TV action-show heroes were supposed to be Vietnam veterans? But no actual Vietnam veteran ever broke in to Hollywood. Why?)

In any event, by 1980 or so it was cool to be a Vietnam vet again. So Dick Blumenthal became one. It was easy enough for a man with a very large case of self-regard and a portion of integrity that could fit into a thimble and still leave room for King Kong’s thumb. He started small, putting small USMC chachkas in his office and letting people think what they would think. At some point, he began answering the question, “Were you in Vietnam?” with a “Yes.” Of course, he didn’t want to talk about it. People took that for modesty, not realizing just how much he had to be modest about.

But time wore through his reticence, and he began to tell war stories. They couldn’t have been his war stories, as he was — at all times — over 10,000 miles from Vietnam. Only in 2010, as he was closing in on a Senate seat, and veterans’ clamor reached his media pals, did he admit to “misspeaking” about Vietnam. He won election handily over an inept opponent (she called him out on his phony veteran shtick,but she wasn’t a veteran either, although she didn’t make any such claims).

Reportedly, he has continued to float Vietnam claims, in private, when alone with constituents, sometimes using the elision-friendly “Vietnam-era veteran” construction and sometimes telling his tale of being spit on on his return from Vietnam.

What an assclown.

Malignant, Militant Hoplophobia

Like many other moral and physical cowards, Dick is terrified by guns in general, very troubled by the people who like them, and most troubled of all by the idea that they are permitted to mere subjects, rather than his personal retainers.

As you might expect, Dick was excited by Newtown, offering as it did the opportunity to get his phony mug on the tube. While he never saw an anti-gun bill he didn’t support, an ego like his isn’t going to sign on to just any bill. Instead,he drafted his own, which he modestly named the Blumenthal Ammunition Background Check Act of 2013. It would:

Ban all ammo sales by non-FFLs

Create a de facto registration by creating a national database of ammunition sales

Require sellers to report to law enforcement for investigation, anyone who buys 1,000 rounds or more

Now, that’s not his only initiative. He also wants registration, bans on “assault weapons” and standard-size magazines, and confiscation of same.

But a lot of Congresscritters want that crap, and they’re not Assclown of the Ides. All of them have unhealthily large egos, and they’re not A of the I either. Slick Dick Blumenthal wins the no-prize because of his phony Vietnam claims, and the path of moral and physical cowardice that brought him to the point where he made them.

Put his ass in the campfire. Cato the Elder “Blumenthal lied about his veteran status”. Hit the twerps social media pages asking for clarification. The electric eye never sleeps and as soon as he messes up a single reply it’s just fuel for his own bonfire.

JK Rowling is experiencing a similar social media F5 regarding immigration. It’s just and hilarious and served up in the one place these creatures crave to shine in, the court of publicity.

All in all, like granny’s chocolate cake, wholesome, satisfying, delicious.

I’ll disagree with you Nose; the “veteran” has no need to “ask” whether these repeated acts are “an insight into the true cut of his character ” – of course they are. Even using the word “character” in the same sentence with this pogue’s name is inappropriate; he’s lying scum who would presume to rule over us, destroy our liberties and impugn the reputation of a man far more worthy than himself.

But aside from that: “Require sellers to report to law enforcement for investigation, anyone who buys 1,000 rounds or more”

I’d really like to know what that’s supposed to accomplish. It’s like the ‘two pistols’ reporting – it’s all right with me, report away! What you get is a list of names, 99.999999999% of whom aren’t going to do anything bad[1]. So you’re the sheriff, and you get the report that Joe Schmoe just bought a case of ammo. What do you do? Call up Major Crimes and have them put their best man on a full field investigation? I don’t think so. You just put it in the dusty file cabinet with all the others.

There was quite a detailed report wrt “mass shootings” put out awhile ago. It is probably somewhere on the web. Among the bits of info that could be mined from it was the fact that the most rounds of ammo fired in any of these incidents was 384 + or -. I remember thinking that the people who posted the report would have posted a higher figure if there was one out there. Of course, most of the 384 rounds were probably fired into the ceiling. Far from restricting the amount of ammo one can use in a mass shooting there ought to be a law requiring any mass shooter to have at least 5000 rounds or 500 pounds of ammo. That will certainly slow him down a lot. The problem with the law just like all the other gun control laws is getting the shooter to obey it.

>Far from restricting the amount of ammo one can use in a mass shooting there ought to be a law requiring any mass shooter to have at least 5000 rounds or 500 pounds of ammo.

Hahaha, exactly! We could also put up one of those “You must be this tall” yardstick-y things at every entrance to a shopping mall, theater, school, etc, with the bar set at 84 inches.
“You must be at least seven feet tall to commit a mass shooting at this establishment.”
Typical (angry older straight white male conservative Christian) mass shooter [looks at sign, bounces on toes experimentally; nope, not even close]: “Aw … shucks!” [Shoulders slump, turns around and goes back to his pickup truck.]
If it saves just ONE life….

Grade A+ example of a piece of whale excrement. Little Dick needed a beatdown at some point in his life, that he never received for being a piece of whale excrement. Why can’t we bring back tar and feathering, for pieces of whale excrement like Little Dick? Why? Public humiliation, in the public square, for politicians like Little Dick, would go a long way in cleaning up the DC dung pit.

Well Dick is from the Gold Coast portion of CT, so there is no way he would have ever served in combat. I believe he is among the richest members of Congress, as in the boy never served this country in any way. He is too rich and too well connected.

He sucked tax payer dollars as the state’s Attorney General before he made his step over to Congress to screw things up for the nation. As the CT AG he literally attempted to Investigate and sue everybody and anybody. He wanted to sue breakfast cereal makers for “misleading” people by advertising that the cereal contained “essential vitamins and minerals”. Recently, as a senator, he wanted to go after airlines for something stupid like baggage fees. He’s rabidly anti/pro anything that places him in front of a camera.

The current CT AG, George Jepsen, had to shutdown hundreds of cases that Attorney General’s office had opened under Blumy. Seriously, hundreds of cases. I believe his words were along the lines of the state didn’t have the time, money or resources to pursue such trivial cases.

I’m sorry the rest of the nation must suffer, but you now get a glimpse of what it’s like to be part of the 45% of CT voters.

The last few gubernatorial races seemed rigged. If I recall correctly, the Republican candidate “won” both elections if you exclude one city, Bridgeport. Once the votes are counted from the urban Democrat stronghold all bets are off. The overall trend mirrors what is going on nationally, with Democrats losing local seats in the smaller cities and towns. Positions in the bicameral state legislature are becoming increasingly hard for Dems to hold onto, but a Republican majority is still many years off. There are some truly stand up folks in the legislature, but their efforts are simply not enough.

Yes, exactly. Bridgeport and New Haven seem to be where the shenanigans ensue. They are always last to report, many precincts there vote 100% (not 95%, not 99%, not 99.9%, but 100%) democrat, and there always seems to be just enough votes to push the democrat over the top statewide.

As a resident of Connecticut I have been convinced our elections have been rigged for years. The only people I know who view the undisputed king of assclownery, Duh-duh Dannel Malloy in any kind of favorable light are state or municipal workers. Everyone else seems to despise that buffoon. Yet he gets reelected and the state legislature remains democrat controlled. You could talk to damn near any random stranger you meet and they would give you an earful about how bad the state is run and how hard its getting for the average working person to get by. I figure between the high percentage of residents that are state or municipal workers and the absolutely ridiculous number of welfare parasites residing here, the elections are already rigged towards whoever will keep the dollars flowing. Eh…I’d love to bail out of this hell hole but I have people to take care of that wont leave. Someday though.

B co. 1/503,74th Inf LRP,N company Ranger 173 Abn Bde Sep RVN 68-70
Thank you for that write up.I have less problems with guys who went to Canada then a weasel like him.
Have been face to face with him and he won’t look you in the eye.The real sad thing is the amount of support he got from veterans in the state.I wish dueling was legal.

Hey, the Canada guys and draft card burners at least made some small sacrifices for it. Blumenthal? His daddy was a bum who didn’t raise him right.

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